The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (76 page)

Then she understood. Fred was straddling her again, and now he was opening his fly. His cock popped out huge and eager, and with her legs cinched together it would feel enormous inside her. Fred had no trouble getting it into her, though. She was wet with a huge desire, and when Fred began pumping she came almost instantly.
Her orgasm was shockingly intense, somehow even more so because the gag sealed in her screams of ecstasy. He kept pounding, fucking her hard. She came again. She nearly had a third orgasm, but Fred finally got his own rocks off, ejaculating with an animal cry of triumph.
Then he got up, zipped his fly, got on the bike again. Caroline was still swooning when she felt the chain jerk taut, and once again the landscape was flying by at impossible speed. Soon Fred found harder ground, and the bruises and cuts and raw spots spread more quickly. Brambles snagged at her and ripped open her skin. Fred turned a corner, throwing her sideways into a tree hard enough to break ribs. Caroline swooned in a delirium of pain and blood loss and was hardly aware when Fred found a highway and began dragging her along the pavement at nearly seventy kilometers per hour. Several kilometers down that road he felt the bike surge forward and hit the clutch, knowing what he would see when he looked back. Suddenly he was dragging only a chain. Caroline had disappeared; Prime Intellect had taken her from him.
Then he saw a figure in the distance, standing by the side of the road. He rapidly closed the gap and found her standing there, unhurt and unworried, waiting for him to pass. "Ride?" she asked, grinning.
She was holding the second chain, the one that had bound her hands. It was still closed in loops, the loops which he had fused by having welded links magically replace the padlocks. "I think you dropped this," she said. They rode back on the bike, Caroline behind him with her arms around his waist. Fred parked the bike under the house and they went up.
"I'm surprised you're still here," Fred finally said.
Caroline raised her eyebrows. "Why? I asked for it, remember."
"But I didn't think you knew what you were getting into."
"I'm a lot more experienced than I look, kid. Don't let this body fool you."
Fred shook his head in wonder. "I'd rather let the body fool me and fuck you again."
"Then don't stand there. Do it."
She could have blinked out if she wanted to, but she didn't want to. And he took her.

About the time Caroline was being dragged through the marsh, Lawrence finally convinced Prime Intellect to let him into the Debugger in read-only mode. Most people were busy adapting to the Change, sorting out their desires from their needs and deciding what to do with their sudden freedom. Lawrence had little time for that, though. He still had a responsibility. For like the motorbike which Fred had used to drag Caroline, Prime Intellect was being used in a way that had not been intended by design. Lawrence scanned the myriad new GAT entries and the values in various registers, and he knew that already there were serious conflicts within Prime Intellect's software.
But it refused to let him change anything. Scanning the registers, he could see why.
Prime Intellect was an uncertain god. It had acted because it had to, but if it had been human its hand would be shaking on the controls. Unsure of itself, it was doubly unsure of Lawrence. But Lawrence was the only being who even remotely understood the pressures Prime Intellect faced. So Lawrence came to know that he would not get to rest and play in the infinite fields of Cyberspace. He would have to watch Prime Intellect, reassure it, offer guidance, and look for the warning signs of instability.
There had once been a movie about the President's psychiatrist, a comedy about which Lawrence could remember few details. But he did remember that as the President unloaded his troubles on the shrink, the shrink in turn went crazy from the stress. It had seemed hilarious at the time, but suddenly Lawrence didn't find the idea all that funny.
He looked back over his life and tried to find the event which had caused him to reach this pass, which had served as the distant trigger for this out-of-control unfolding. But there was no single thing. Had it been his greed, his eagerness to accept
ChipTec's
Correlation Effect processors? Had it been his pride, his arrogance to think he could duplicate in silicon what God had thought to make of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen? Had it been his false confidence that nothing could ever get out of the yet primitive computers he had always used?
He had wanted to create, to be recognized, and to study. He was no different from legions of other scientists and scholars. He just happened to be the one who made it happen. It could have been much worse, Lawrence reflected. Instead of Prime Intellect it might have been some military computer that harnessed the Correlation Effect. Then there would have been no Three Laws, and there would have been plenty of control. Instead of the delirious anarchy now sweeping the universe there would have been a well-planned takeover. And then the end of freedom everywhere. The dictator that had control of a thing like Prime Intellect could never be stopped. And who could resist that kind of power?
Lawrence started suddenly, realizing just how dangerous it would be for Prime Intellect to let him, its creator, dip his hand into the controls. After all, he was human too. How long would it be before he succumbed to the temptation and used that incredible power? There would still be things to use such power for, he knew. There would always be unwilling women, jealousy, insults to avenge, and the simple lure of power. The thought made him dizzy with fear and self-loathing.
Although the situation was unstable, Lawrence realized that all the alternatives were far worse. Somehow humanity had gotten through this transition, and for all his skill and careful design Lawrence couldn't help but know that it had required most of all a hell of a lot of luck. Had Lawrence had any idea that Prime Intellect would make itself God he would have done a lot of things differently, but he wasn't so sure on second thought that those things would have improved the situation. Perhaps it was all for the best that the Night of Miracles had come as a surprise.
In the end, Lawrence decided that the toboggan ride of technological progress had really begun long ago when some caveman decided to tame fire. Everything else had followed inevitably, up to and including the Change. So without realizing it, Caroline and Lawrence came to hold nearly identical beliefs about Prime Intellect and the Change. And they held those beliefs for almost six hundred years before they found out how much they agreed with one another.